Flemington-Raritan students mark one-year anniversary of Japanese tsunami

As memory fades of the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan one year ago, students at three Flemington-Raritan schools have not forgotten.

On Thursday at Robert Hunter, an all-school assembly capped a year during which a sister-school relationship began to evolve between Robert Hunter and Ofunato Elementary School.

The assembly will be shown on Japanese broadcaster NHK's morning news and copies of the video will be sent on to their peers in the hard-hit Iwate prefecture.

Students, giddy about being on Japanese television, sang their school song before shouting well-wishes to their pen pals.

"The whole idea was to … say, 'We remember you, we care about you still and how are you doing?'" fourth-grader Hunter Billitti said.

In the weeks following the March 11 natural disaster, then 7-year-old Musashi Eto helped arrange for cash donation boxes and organized a schoolwide letter-writing campaign to send personalized notes to Japanese students.

Thousands of letters have since been exchanged through the Flemington-Iwate Friendship Network as the project spread to J.P. Case and Desmares and across the country to Seattle, where a Japanese family friend brought it to her child's school.

Students at J.P. Case have corresponded with students at Ofunato and Akasaki middle schools, and Desmares students with Akasaki, Takonoura and Massaki elementary schools.

Flags — signed by Robert Hunter, J.P. Case and Desmares students and with the group's logo — are also bound for Japan.

"We just want to make them happy by giving them our friendship," Robert Hunter third-grader Matthew Dalessandro said.

Despite the back-and-forth letters, their peers will see them for the first time in the video.
A team of 11 students, led by gifted-and-talented teacher Barbara Stewart and computer teacher Patricia Leslie, have been brainstorming ideas for ways to perpetuate the cultural exchange.

The team plans to take pictures of Flemington and their school day to send to Japan, Musashi said.

"I think the project is going to go on and when I go to RFIS (Reading-Fleming Intermediate School), somebody … could pick it up and I could do it over at RFIS," he said.

Miki Ebara, chief correspondent for NHK's New York bureau, said she was touched by the school's efforts to help and support Japan.

"I think they'd be really happy to see little children being very interested in the people and culture of Japan," she said of viewers in Japan.

The aftermath of the tsunami, which dispersed once tight-knit villages, lingers on, she said.

"Before a family of three, four generations lived together, but because their houses were washed away, they have to live in a smaller shelter," she said, adding that fathers often go elsewhere to find jobs. "So all tight-knit Japanese communities are scattered around … and in that sense, it's still very, very difficult."

On Friday, Fujisankei, which owns Japan's most-watched television network, will interview teachers and students from Robert Hunter and J.P. Case about the project.